Clint Eastwood (73 page)

A soft-spoken, weather-beaten man of unshakable calm, Wayne Van Horn (to call him by his rightful name) was literally born into the business. His father was a veterinarian working and living on the Universal back lot, caring for the studio’s menagerie, and Buddy grew up there, becoming a professional rider as soon as it was legal, then graduating to stunt work. He was, Clint judged, the ideal man to lead the troops through a film that was wall-to-wall “gags,” as stuntpeople call even their unfunny work. If you like it you can direct it, Clint said when he called to say he was sending over the script. “I like it already,” said Buddy.

The film profits from his uncondescending craftsmanship, and Buddy Van Horn profited from its success. He was not a man with a personal statement to make—one can only imagine the puzzled monosyllables that might greet a question on that topic—nor someone with a career to make; he was doing quite nicely with stunts, thank you. But he was, and is, a technically proficient moviemaker, the unabrasive spirit Clint had been looking for to guide low-key projects he didn’t feel like directing himself. He would make two more films for Clint and continue to serve as his stunt coordinator and, since he is an expert player, Clint’s location golfing partner.

In this instance, his entirely agreeable work made no new converts to the cause of low comedy, but among critics who dared to make fine distinctions in this realm it found a certain favor.
Any Which Way You Can
was, Janet Maslin (correctly) wrote, “better and funnier than its predecessor.” Carrie Rickey, a self-confessed fan, didn’t feel like going that far, but in a review that took the form of an open letter to Clint made a nice point: “A lot of my friends, armchair moralists that they are, complain that your movies are ‘gratuitously violent.’ Since they don’t get to see your movies on principle (although they’ll race out to see
Raging Bull
because it’s ‘art’) they’re unaware of the moralism that informs your screen persona.”

But whether one liked it a little more or a little less than
Every Which Way but Loose
is beside the point. The film’s salient defect was inherent; it could not surprise us as Philo Beddoe’s first adventure had. It could only—well—ape it, which it very profitably did.

In the spring of 1982, some fifteen years into his movie stardom, someone finally, lengthily, attempted seriously to come to grips with the
Clint Eastwood phenomenon. The venue,
The New York Review of Books
, being no less remarkable than the effort, this was an event as portentous as the MoMA retrospective, a signal of arrival in intellectual territory no one had expected him to penetrate. The title of Robert Mazzocco’s essay, “The Supply-Side Star,” linked Clint’s popularity to the new national spirit of the Reagan era, a thought that had, or would, occur to other, less nuanced observers. But this writer was after something more subtle. He saw the popularity of Clint’s screen character as a reactionary phenomenon of a sort, but not a dangerous one. Noting that “
the sixties was largely a decade of confrontation based on an egalitarian ethic, however falteringly understood, against the predatory and powerful, the seventies increasingly became an epoch of polarization, built on a jingoistic and retributive ethic,” he observed that violence was common to both periods. He said it was turned inward in the earlier one, outward (as in Clint’s movies) in the latter one. But he detected in Clint’s screen persona none of that meanness of the conservative spirit on which it was Ronald Reagan’s business to draw his happy faces. Rather, he saw an attempt to blend two traditional American modes, “the irreverence of the free spirit and the ruthlessness of the rugged individualist” and, certainly, an attempt to reanimate the Leatherstocking hero, “the saint with a gun.”

But Mazzocco observed two more interesting aspects to Clint’s work. “All the tropes of adversity, the primary male appetites—greed, honor, fraud, struggle, violence—are there, but significantly diluted of any real social, intellectual or even familial coloration.” He also saw “how effectively” Clint “struggles against absorption into mere genre, mere style, even while appearing with his long-boned casualness and hypnotic presence to be nothing but style.” What we seem to have here is an individualism that transcended its traditional representations onscreen and transcended, as well, its current cultural definitions, linking past and present in subtly suggestive ways.

By coincidence, this piece appeared less than three months before the movie that would, by indirection, prove its validity.
Firefox
is one of the most curious entries in the Eastwood filmography, for it is his only movie to rely heavily on special visual effects and the only one to deal directly with the Cold War. It is also one of his very few movies in which, to borrow Mazzocco’s formulation, he is thoroughly “absorbed” in genre style, unable to assert his own.

Craig Thomas’s novel, on which the film was based, was recommended to Clint by the pilot and the owner of the helicopter he used for aerial sequences. It told a very simple story: The Russians have developed in the eponymous jet fighter a plane so technologically advanced
it could alter the balance of Cold War power. The United States must steal the prototype in order to learn its secrets and create a countervailing force. Mitch Gant, the character Clint would play, is the man for the job, since he speaks Russian and is a hot pilot.

Or is he? Haunted by his experiences in Vietnam, both as a man who killed innocent civilians and as a POW, Mitch is on extended leave from the service and sanity—“really kind of fragile goods,” as Clint phrases it. Under pressure, the possibility of him freezing and cracking is large, and eventually we will find him disguised behind wimpish glasses and mustache quaking in a men’s room during the course of a deadly chase through Moscow (for which Vienna was persuasively doubled). Since Firefox can be flown and fought by mental telepathy, a pilot prone to mental vapor lock may not be the ideal choice for this assignment, after all.

Clint naturally thought his weaknesses made Mitch all the more interesting to play. And he also liked the fact that when he got to Russia his underground allies were members of the Jewish underground, much put upon by Soviet anti-Semitism. Clint’s contempt for windy Cold War rhetoric and vast geopolitical exertions was still very much intact; he has never wavered in his belief that it is, politically,
the
clear and present danger to individualism. But anti-Semitism is something he felt strongly about. It grounded the basic silliness afflicting all espionage stories in a reality he could comprehend.

As to special effects,
Star Wars, Star Trek, E. T.
and
Blade Runner
(the last two being among the movies
Firefox
would compete with in the summer of 1982) were creating a new “
amphetamine aesthetic” in movies, as Andrew Sarris observed in his review of Clint’s film. The trend, he said, was “away from realism in all categories, dramatic, psychological, sociological, even optical. The mania for location shooting in the sixties and seventies has given way to a return to glitzy studio sets, special effects, miniatures, and animation.” Manifestly, Clint perceived this phenomenon too, so we have to see this film as a sort of experiment, an attempt to see how he would like working under the new dispensation.

Still, the effects the script called for were, literally, not too far out. Concentrated in the film’s last third, after Mitch has filched the fighter, they are employed to visualize its pursuit by a second Firefox prototype and, eventually, their dogfight over Arctic seas and ice cap—“all in the atmosphere of this planet and all flying as we know it,” as Clint puts it. Even so, he found this work frustrating. The first firm he tried to engage for the effects work drove him and Fritz Manes crazy with contractual wrangling (Bob Daley, perhaps because of his lack of enthusiasm for
previous projects, perhaps because, as Clint somewhat unfairly grumbles, he seemed more interested now in collecting first editions than he was in producing movies, had departed). They turned, finally, to Apogee, John Dykstra’s firm, which had worked on the first
Star Wars
, and eventually were entirely satisfied by its creations. But special effects are inevitably slow and costly, and at more than $20 million, this was far and away the most expensive budget, and the most expansive schedule (well over a year), Malpaso had ever indulged.

The film would later achieve substantial grosses. But in the final analysis, it was not worth the effort. There was many a draggy exposition scene in Russian and American situation rooms, and even though Bruce Surtees lit the passages dealing with underground activity “seriously”—at much lower light levels than we are used to in entertainments of this kind—they are not all that suspenseful. At the time Clint was evincing some real-life interest in freelance military operations, but skulking about is not something he knows or cares a lot about; it may seem to suit the cool side of his nature, but it is antithetical to his explosive side, and the film lacks the boyish élan the last two decades of spy movies had taught people to expect from the genre.

The film was poorly received. “A James Bond movie without the girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor,” said Vincent Canby. “Luke Skywalker trapped in Dirty Harry’s soul,” someone at
People
thought. David Denby in
New York
thought Mitch Gant might be meant to symbolize “America itself, traumatized by Nam,” the movie intended possibly as “a shot in the arm for a country that (as the jargon goes) ‘has lost its will’ to fight Communism.” In their various ways, they were trying to come to grips with the film’s curiously detached manner. Sarris’s analysis was the most persuasive: Clint, he wrote “
is not the establishment figure his East Coast detractors imagine,” but rather “a mysterious loner with few ties to civilization.” Thus, the critic said, he “has always looked ill at ease in uniforms and organizations,” and
Firefox
tended to “submerge the anarchic side of Eastwood.” Thus the ecstatic flee-
and
-fight finale, by far the film’s best passage, “serves … to express the liberation of a born and made loner from the constraints of a turgid cold war plot.”

The film had two rather gratifying upscale premieres, which drew many of Sarris’s dubious eastern swells, a society where Clint would more and more frequently find himself. The one in Washington, benefiting the USO, was chaired by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and his wife. The secretary found himself deserted the minute Clint made his entrance. In New York the beneficiaries were Clint’s new best friends at MoMA, where an evening consisting of cocktails in
Blanchette Rockefeller’s garden, a screening and a dinner dance at the Pierre raised $100,000 for the museum’s film preservation fund.

But even as he hobnobbed with the elite, Clint found himself drawn into less elevated circles. Urged on by Fritz Manes, whose nostalgia for his Marine Corps service had transmuted into a romantic regard for paramilitary adventuring, he had in 1979 and 1980 been introduced to Bob Denard, who had mounted a successful mercenary invasion of the Comoros Islands, a former French possession off the east coast of Africa, and Mitchell Werbell III, one of the inventors of the silencer-equipped Ingraham Model II submachine gun and the proprietor of a counter-terrorist school. Both entered public, if dubious, claims that Clint was interested in developing screenplays about their adventures, but nothing came of these brief encounters.

Not so his connection with James G. (Bo) Gritz, a sometime Green Beret lieutenant colonel much decorated for his service in Vietnam. He approached Clint sometime in 1982 seeking financial support for an incursion into Laos from Thailand in search of American soldiers officially listed as missing in action, but according to Gritz (and to widespread fantasies of the time) actually being held in secret prison camps. His first idea, according to Clint, was to have him make, or pretend to make, a movie on the Thai border as a kind of diversion during which Gritz and friends would slip away on their mission. “Geez, that doesn’t sound too smart,” Clint replied, but still he kept listening. He was told that the Carter administration had deliberately hushed up evidence that the MIAs were still alive so that it would not have to take official action on their behalf. This sounded plausible to Clint, ever suspicious of government actions and inactions, and Gritz was “a really good salesman.” At some point he found himself saying, “Boy, I’ll tell you, I would not be able to sleep at night if I thought there was one person being held against his will and knowing that something could be done about it.”

If Gritz was not exactly his kind of guy, he was certainly his kind of problem solver—impatient with talk, eager for direct action. So Clint offered him money—variously reported at thirty thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars—and help rounding up other support as well. He did not approach William Shatner, who also gave the colonel ten thousand dollars in the form of an option on his life story, which he unsuccessfully tried to place with the TV networks, but Clint admits, “I did a lot of stuff for them, a lot of legwork”—mostly asking corporate CEOs to donate equipment to the would-be invaders. What he could not secure was the support of the Reagan administration, even though he called the president and got his pledge to look into the matter. The report Reagan got back from Robert McFarlane, chief deputy to the national
security adviser, was that Gritz “
was not somebody we ought to be involved with.”